Episode 62
Greg Wilson Pt 2
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This week, we had the absolute pleasure of diving into the fascinating journey of the legendary Greg Wilson! He took us way back to his childhood in Merseyside, where the magic of the 60s and the ever-present soundtrack of The Beatles became deeply ingrained. It wasn't a distraction from anything, but more of an exploration of that incredible era's creativity and optimistic spirit. Imagine growing up a stone's throw from the Tower Ballroom where The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were tearing it up!
Greg shared how his deep dives into artists like Bowie and Dylan fueled his passion for understanding the evolution of music. This meticulous approach would later come into play in unexpected ways.
Then, we took a turn into the vibrant world of early UK street dance with Broken Glass. Greg recounted how a chance encounter with Kermit (later of the Rap Assassins and Black Grape) led to managing this groundbreaking breakdancing crew. Their "street tour" of the Northwest sounds legendary, breaking down barriers and even sparking connections across racial lines in a time when such interactions were less common in some areas. He fondly remembers seeing young white and black kids connecting over the music and dance – a real moment of positive social impact.
The conversation then shifted to the emergence of the Ruthless Rap Assassins. Greg vividly described the raw energy and unique attitude of their early tapes, particularly the track "We Don't Care." Their originality and unexpected humor immediately grabbed him, leading to him taking on management and production duties. He walked us through their journey, from getting studio time to eventually signing with EMI – a "mad" move for such an uncompromising act.
The story of their time with EMI is a rollercoaster, from creative freedom with their first album ("Sample City" with its insane sample layering – think Hendrix, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ringo Starr, Happy Mondays, and even Sergeant Pepper!) to the clash with the main marketing department who, fresh off the success of MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice, didn't quite grasp the Rap Assassins' hardcore, socially conscious, and often satirical vibe. The near miss with Simon Bates playing the wrong side of their single perfectly illustrates the challenges they faced with radio play, which ultimately hampered their commercial success despite critical acclaim.
Greg also touched on the early days of re-editing for radio, including a surprising stint doing edits for none other than Timmy Mallett! These "turntable edits" using basic gear laid the groundwork for his later influential work in the re-edit scene.
It's a fantastic episode packed with anecdotes about musical discovery, the early UK hip-hop scene, and the challenges of navigating the music industry. You won't want to miss Greg's insights into the creative process and the stories behind these pivotal moments in music history!
Mentioned in this episode:
Reissued classics from Be With Records
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Transcript
Right, welcome back to Want A dj.
Speaker A:Everyone.
Speaker A:We're here once again with Greg Wilson.
Speaker A:Greg, how are you doing today?
Speaker B:Good.
Speaker B:Nice sunny day.
Speaker B:Here we are in Merseyside and all is well with the world.
Speaker A:Amazing.
Speaker A:So we've established you went in down a very, very, very deep, sort of rabbit hole of the Beatles at the time.
Speaker A:Did it feel like you were trying to use it as a distraction?
Speaker B:No, I don't think a distraction.
Speaker B:I think what it was doing, as I say, I mean, I.
Speaker B:I'm a child of the 60s.
Speaker B: I was born in: Speaker B:On a history level, that's really good for me because it's, you know, it's.
Speaker B:It's like I can pick out years quite quickly.
Speaker B:I know when I was 25, you know, because I was born in 60, it's going to be a five number, you know, so it's that kind of thing.
Speaker B:I mean, Lennon was born in 40, so that gives another kind of thing on that, on that aspect.
Speaker B:So 20 years older than I was.
Speaker B:So the 60s, I experienced those as a child and there was an absolute magic.
Speaker B:But obviously when you're a child, you don't know whether the magic is also because you're a child.
Speaker B:So this.
Speaker B:Yeah, but that's why I say the proofs in the pudding with the music.
Speaker B:The music exists, it's there, it happened.
Speaker B:Wow.
Speaker B:It still does that, those things you.
Speaker B:I mean, not just the Beatles, but, you know, so much music from the 60s.
Speaker B:It was just like such a glorious, rich age for creativity as it was moving into the 70s and on.
Speaker B:But the 60s was the, you know, the kind of special period of optimism.
Speaker B:We can change the world, anything is possible.
Speaker B:We've moved away from the grayness of two world wars and our parents and grandparents, generations, and we're making that.
Speaker B:That was the kind of statement of the 60s.
Speaker B:A lot of it was naive.
Speaker B:You know, when you look back, you can see why certain things didn't work out and would never have worked out, but people believed at that, that point in time in the, in, in.
Speaker B:These things happen.
Speaker B:I mean, what's interesting as well was I actually the closest I got to the Beatles was probably a couple of minute walk across.
Speaker B:I lived in a house and it was on the back of what we call the Tower Grounds in New Brighton on Merseyside.
Speaker B:And the Tower Grounds had the Tower Ballroom.
Speaker B:And the Tower Ballroom, where the Beatles played quite, you know, over 40 times, I think, and certainly over 30 operation big beats, which was.
Speaker B:I'm just trying to remember the amount is it 20 or 30 over 20 times or 30 times and try not to over egg it.
Speaker B:But Operation Big Beat was this major event.
Speaker B:This is before the Beatles were signed.
Speaker B:In fact, they were signed as they did one of the gigs they just signed and Love Me do it come out one of the latter gigs that they did.
Speaker B:So came to the Tower Ballroom many times as did the Rolling Stones and.
Speaker B:And all sorts of different artists.
Speaker B:And they played these nights and so that was the closest proximity.
Speaker B:I was there.
Speaker B:I was a little kid asleep in bed as they were doing these gigs in the next street to where.
Speaker B:To where they were.
Speaker B:And my.
Speaker B:My nan, well, my parents as well, but my nana the guest house and she wants.
Speaker B:She told me one of the Rolling Stones stayed there but I kind of think it may probably been one of the road crew or something like that.
Speaker B:But they played at the Tower bore and so, yeah, that was.
Speaker B:That was it.
Speaker B:You know, the Beatles were the.
Speaker B:As the soundtrack along with so much other stuff.
Speaker B:But the Beatles were just always there.
Speaker B:They were.
Speaker B:They were, you know, just the four of them, the way they.
Speaker B:It was as a kid.
Speaker B:It was.
Speaker B:They were just part of the.
Speaker B:The furniture.
Speaker B:They were just there for a kid my age who hadn't, you know, by the time you can remember anything properly, you're two or three.
Speaker B:And they were making records then.
Speaker B:So it was just.
Speaker B:It was constantly in place.
Speaker B:But as I say, through all my time of being a dj, I'd never had that time to be able to sit down like I've done with other artists since, like Dylan and stuff.
Speaker B:I mean, I knew bits of Dylan's stuff but, you know, it was more recently, over the last.
Speaker B:I think it's about 10, 12 years ago.
Speaker B:I thought now's the time.
Speaker B:And I went album for album and worked out.
Speaker B:I wanted to know what, you know, what happened when and how it all worked out.
Speaker B:I mean, it's amazing, you know, and.
Speaker B:And that came from, as I say with the Beatles.
Speaker B:That's what I did pretty much in the.
Speaker B:In the 80s.
Speaker B:I mean, I'd done it with Bowie when I was a younger kid, you know, that that was where it really started that, you know, I.
Speaker B:Starman came on Top of the Pops when I was 12 and me, like so many other people in the UK at that point, were really touched by this performance and obviously the track and I went and bought it and then I remember saying to the woman saying, oh, I've got another one of his if you want it.
Speaker B:And I was like, oh, right.
Speaker B:And it was changes and it was the previous single.
Speaker B:And, you know, when I.
Speaker B:I got that, that kind of was a really great example of not all hits are great records and not all great.
Speaker B:You know.
Speaker B:You know, some records aren't.
Speaker B:Hits are great.
Speaker B:You know, it was like that hadn't been a hit.
Speaker B:I'd never come across that from.
Speaker B:Because at the time I.
Speaker B:I looked at the charts but.
Speaker B:And it.
Speaker B:And to discover that.
Speaker B:So what.
Speaker B:What happened with Bowie after that?
Speaker B:I just went totally into the obsession that I bought everything I could.
Speaker B:And so, you know, I was 13.
Speaker B:I just owned every album that he'd released.
Speaker B:I'd found a brilliant bootleg album of his that was called Live in Santa Monica.
Speaker B:I think it's had an official release since.
Speaker B:But back then it was this amazing live gig that they did from the Ziggy Stardust period.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And so, you know, my Bowie obsession went that way that I just had to hear it all.
Speaker B:I just had to work it all out.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And so that was the primer.
Speaker B:But as I say, the Beatles was just the vastness of it.
Speaker B:It was just how.
Speaker B:How deep and how wide it goes.
Speaker B:And for as wide and deep as you know it is, you know, it can go further and deeper again.
Speaker A:So were you managing Broken Glass at that point or did that come later?
Speaker B:No, I came just after all that period, really.
Speaker B:It came like kind mid-80s when, you know, I was, you know, I.
Speaker B:I lost my.
Speaker B:I've come away from DJ and so I was disconnected.
Speaker B:The.
Speaker B:I'd also got into financial difficulty.
Speaker B:The production.
Speaker B:The record production side hadn't worked out and now, you know, I wasn't earning money.
Speaker B:I had debts, I had a house.
Speaker B:I mean, I basically lost it all.
Speaker B:I lost my house eventually.
Speaker B:I had a.
Speaker B:That I had repayment still on.
Speaker B:I lost that.
Speaker B:So it was a very bleak period on that level.
Speaker B:I was kind of.
Speaker B:Everything was disintegrating around me and it was around that point where this came into my life, you know, because I remember being so skinned.
Speaker B:As I say, you know, when I was acquiring these books, it was like looking for bargains.
Speaker B:I wasn't going to Waterstones or wherever the equivalent back then and looking for the.
Speaker B:You know, I was trying to find something for 25p in A.
Speaker B:In a bargain bin somewhere.
Speaker A:So hand, how did you end up managing the breakers and.
Speaker A:And kind of.
Speaker A:How involving was that?
Speaker B:Well, that was when, like at Legend.
Speaker B:I mean, it was Kermit, who was later with the Rap Assassins and Black Grape, who basically, I mean, I was aware of break dancing at this point, you know, Buffalo Gals video had been.
Speaker B:But it hadn't kind of hit the streets in the uk and Kermit said to me he was part of a crew and they were now going into Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester, and I went to check them out and I suggested they do a, like I called a street tour of the Northwest, you know, like shopping centers and, you know, like town squares and stuff.
Speaker B:And that's what we did.
Speaker B:And we got all the newspapers in each of the towns.
Speaker B:I'd ring them beforehand and say, oh, this New York thing.
Speaker B:And it's this dancing and you've got to come and see it.
Speaker B:And they come and take photos and do a little piece and.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And so that was what we first did.
Speaker B:And very soon, like, TV started to come in for them.
Speaker B:They did local tv, Granada Reports, and then the tube came up, a few national TV things and they.
Speaker B:They did one of the tracks on the UK electro album that I did Kermit and FIDs wrapping.
Speaker B:So they were like.
Speaker B:Some of them were kids that came into my.
Speaker B:My club, you know, into Legend.
Speaker B:I mean, the majority of the crew were.
Speaker B:And so, like, it was a natural extension of that, really, that I got involved and I was involved for maybe about probably 9 to 12 months before my life started getting a bit complicated and the money dried up and the.
Speaker B:Yeah, it hadn't worked out with the UK electoral as hoped and stuff.
Speaker B:So, you know.
Speaker B:But it was an incredible period, you know, like, they toured around the country and as I said, they did a lot of tv.
Speaker B:They were very loved, very accepted, you know, people.
Speaker B:It was great to see.
Speaker B:I mean, what they did for race relations, you know, that was an incredible thing.
Speaker B:I always remember when we did that, a very original street tour going into.
Speaker B:I think it was witness and seeing, like, groups of local lads seeing all these black kids.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Getting out of a van and.
Speaker B:And what is going on, you know, in an area where there weren't black people.
Speaker B:And it was a recipe for disaster, in a sense.
Speaker B:It was like, you know, a lot of people viewing that situation would have thought, there's going to be trouble.
Speaker B:And then all of a sudden they roll out a piece of lino and put down a ghetto blaster.
Speaker B:And what was amazing was that I saw these young white kids gravitate towards them, and I kind of knew that many of these had never had a conversation with a black person before.
Speaker B:And all of a sudden they're all.
Speaker B:They're saying, what is this?
Speaker B:What's this music?
Speaker B:What's this dancing, there's this exchange going on and it was beautiful.
Speaker B:You know, it was like, wonderful to see that happening.
Speaker B:And so break dancing, you know, did so much for bringing young white kids and black kids together and, and breaking down those barriers and everything, as did the jazz funk scene before that.
Speaker B:But, you know, Breakdown to be such a kind of big, like, flash, you know, when it happened and it opened up and everything.
Speaker B:So, so that was, that, that was great, you period.
Speaker B:They carried on after I stopped managing them and, and did the thing for a number of years to come and a legendary now, you know, in, in British B boy circles.
Speaker B:Anyone, you know, who doesn't know them as OGs, you know, like, doesn't know the B boy in, in this country.
Speaker A:So how did this then evolve into Ruthless Rap Assassins, if that's the kind of right way of putting it.
Speaker B:Well, Kermit again.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:So Kermit, who was in Broken Glass in this interim period while I was pretty much down on my look, I'd started a rap crew with the Heinz Brothers, Anderson and Carlson in Hume called the Ruthless Rap Assassins and got in touch with me and he said, we've got, we've got a crew, I've got a tape.
Speaker B:And he sent me this tape and it's really kind of roughly recorded and everything.
Speaker B:But there was so, you know, straight away I thought the attitude, love the attitude.
Speaker B:And there was this one track, We Don't Care, and it was like a black punk track almost.
Speaker B:It was just really in your face.
Speaker B:It was relentless.
Speaker B:And I just, I, I just loved it.
Speaker B:So I loved what they were.
Speaker B:They weren't doing anything like anyone else.
Speaker B:It was like, these guys are original.
Speaker B:The humor again, you know, they, they, they struck me with the, you know, the humor of the lyrics and everything.
Speaker B:And so that's, that's what happened, that I took on the management role with them and started producing them.
Speaker B:We got like, I think initially we got Ireland to get us in the studio and we did what became the first white label with, with that session.
Speaker B:But we never signed to Ireland because guy called Ian Dewhurst dude facilitated all that.
Speaker B:He'd left the company.
Speaker B:So the.
Speaker B:Our main contact wasn't there anymore and the other labels were starting to show interest.
Speaker B:And in the end we ended up at emi, which was mad, you know, it was a mad label for the Rap Assassins to sign to.
Speaker B:And if truth be told, EMI really signed them on the strength of.
Speaker B:We also had Kermit's sister Christine and her mate Anne Mar, were called Kiss amc and the Rap Assassins did a track called Kiss AMC which they did live early.
Speaker B:And the girls also did backup for a few other tracks.
Speaker B:And when they EMI had seen them live, they come to the Hacienda to see the.
Speaker B:The Rap Assassins before they signed them Kiss AMC on there.
Speaker B:And I think they saw with the girls we can sell.
Speaker B:You know, I think the girls look fantastic.
Speaker B:You know, they had like a real great style about them and everything.
Speaker B:Although they weren't the best rappers the world.
Speaker B:They.
Speaker B:They weren't even into, you know, hip hop so much.
Speaker B:They were like into the Bodines and the Smiths and all these.
Speaker B:The Sugar Cubes.
Speaker B:I found out Bjerg through them when she was in the Sugar Cube.
Speaker B:They were into all this kind of stuff.
Speaker B:So it was a bit of a laugh to them and we approached it in that way as well.
Speaker B:And they ended up doing the.
Speaker B:The singles for EMI before the Rap Assassins put their album out.
Speaker B:So I think in a sense we got the emi.
Speaker B:I don't think.
Speaker B:I think it was.
Speaker B:Would have just been the three guys.
Speaker B:EMI would have been.
Speaker B:They'd stepped away.
Speaker B:It was too hardcore too what they would have thought confrontational.
Speaker B:You know, it would.
Speaker B:Rap music was seen in certain.
Speaker B:It was the time that you know like, you know, NWA and stuff was about to come through.
Speaker B:Public Enemy of course were about and everything.
Speaker B:So I don't think the record companies here really had a good handle on rap too much at the time.
Speaker B:But they, you know, they decided that they'd take a punt with us and we ended up doing two albums for them.
Speaker B:And yeah, it was a really great period, a five year period.
Speaker B:It was sad that it came to an end but all things do, you know.
Speaker B:And it was sad that they never got the.
Speaker B:The sales.
Speaker B:I.
Speaker B:I wouldn't say the acclaim because they did get the acclaim and they still get the acclaim.
Speaker B:And there was even a piece written for a Manchester publication only a few weeks about the North Hume Sound, which is.
Speaker B:It was a kind of throwaway line that they used.
Speaker B:There used to be the KRS 1 South Bronx.
Speaker B:He's saying South Bronx South, South Bronx.
Speaker B:And so they used to go North Fume the North north view.
Speaker B:But.
Speaker B:And then the music became known as the North Hume Sound and magazines started to print it that way.
Speaker B:And somebody, you know, a writer who obviously probably wasn't even born when this stuff was out just saw it and decided I want to find out more about that and did a piece about it just recently.
Speaker B:So they're still out there in the ether.
Speaker B:But they never got the sales.
Speaker B:We never got.
Speaker B:We were.
Speaker B:We fell down on.
Speaker B:It was radio that was the problem.
Speaker B:We never got the support on radio.
Speaker B:Yeah, we got some John Peel plays.
Speaker B:I mean, that was great, but we didn't get the daytime radio that we needed that would have sold the album through.
Speaker B:We had a single chord and it wasn't a dream.
Speaker B:And we.
Speaker B:A lot of our hopes were pinned on that.
Speaker B:And I remember the girls who did the radio promotion, they were pushing and pushing to get it, and nothing had happened for a couple of weeks.
Speaker B:And then all of a sudden, we've got to play.
Speaker B:It's on Simon Batesho.
Speaker B:He's gonna play it.
Speaker B:It was like.
Speaker B:And it was the breakthrough because if he played it, then maybe they could get it on the playlist or get other people to play it.
Speaker B:And he put the wrong side on.
Speaker B:And it was a real kind of in your face track called Posse Strong, which was completely different.
Speaker B:And it wasn't Dreams, much more laid back.
Speaker B:Posse Strong was like punching you in the face.
Speaker B:And he never bothered, he never corrected that.
Speaker B:He never rectified it.
Speaker B:He never played it again.
Speaker B:It was almost like he must have thought, I hate this band because, you know, I put the wrong side on, you know, that it was his mistake.
Speaker B:But it wasn't like, the next day he played it again and we never got that play.
Speaker B:And so the radio side was such a big letdown.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And they even did a couple of tracks where they were kind of, you know, dissing Radio for.
Speaker B:For basically not kind of getting behind them.
Speaker A:I suppose it could have been a Trojan horse, like how Eminem released My Name Is to kind of hook people in before all the darker work that is on the album.
Speaker B:Well, yeah, I mean, and that was the thing about the Assassins, that they could like, really come with serious social commentary, you know.
Speaker B:I mean, two of their tracks are rated, like.
Speaker B:I mean, people have said that the best British hip hop lyrics, you know, like.
Speaker B:And it wasn't Dream Injustice, just us.
Speaker B:But at the same time, they could just take the piss.
Speaker B:And that's what they were doing.
Speaker B:They were just having fun, you know, and, like, so they were.
Speaker B:They were great fun, you know, so it balanced out.
Speaker B:It balanced out.
Speaker B:And, you know, I'm not making a comparison with the Beatles or anything, but just saying that that thing you can see, like, with the Beatles, that on one level you've got this serious music, these guys are serious musicians, but at the same time, you know, just.
Speaker B:They're just full of fun, you know, the.
Speaker B:The The.
Speaker B:The.
Speaker B:It's that kind of combination that, you know, we had, like, with the Rap Assassins that they could work both sides of that.
Speaker B:And, you know, and so, yeah, you know, the.
Speaker B:The track that was on the B side, as I say, I mean, later.
Speaker B:Roots maneuver, they said that.
Speaker B:He said that the Rap Assassins were at the roots of Grimes.
Speaker B:And when I thought about that and look back, I thought that these were probably the Rap Assassins tracks that.
Speaker B:I mean, Kermit used to program these drums and.
Speaker B:And he did it on Posse Strong.
Speaker B:He did it on a track called Here Today, Here Tomorrow, which I love.
Speaker B:Which one of Carson's tracks?
Speaker B:And the.
Speaker B:It's that kind of sound that I think he.
Speaker B:He.
Speaker B:He likens to, you know, what would later become.
Speaker B:Become Grime.
Speaker B:But it was just.
Speaker B:Again, it's just a.
Speaker B:Making it up on the spot using what you've got around you, you know, the tools, the records, you know, a turntable, a sampler, a drum machine, you know, and that's what it was.
Speaker B:You know, it was very creative process.
Speaker B:The way that I work.
Speaker B:I mean, they were very chill guys, you know, I mean, it was like, you get in the studio and, you know, it could take hours to get started.
Speaker B:It was one more spliff after the next, you know, it was like.
Speaker B:And you just.
Speaker B:But at the same time, I knew that once you started, they could achieve what, you know, in an hour, would it take another band to achieve in a day?
Speaker B:You know, they.
Speaker B:Because it was spontaneous, it just exploded and we caught it.
Speaker B:We caught it all.
Speaker B:It was up to me later to make sense of it and put it all together in the mix and in the edits and everything.
Speaker B:But the actual performance, that you could get it from them, but you couldn't, like, force that.
Speaker B:You know, they have to be in the right headspace for it.
Speaker A:I think with the mix as well.
Speaker A:It's quite interesting listening to it, considering that quote about it being the.
Speaker A:The sort of start or key influencing Grime is with the mix.
Speaker A:It seems like the stuff that I was listening to.
Speaker A:There's a lot of space in the mix for the vocals, you know, say, compared to, like a Bomb Squad production or something like that, where it's just full of everything.
Speaker A:There's.
Speaker A:Yeah, the vocals get so much sort of emphasis in the Rap Assassin stuff.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker B:I mean, I don't know if there's anything conscious in that way.
Speaker B:You know, we weren't like, kind of.
Speaker B:It's.
Speaker B:It's.
Speaker B:It is.
Speaker B:It was literally, you know, just how it came out, guys have come with ideas, go in the studio and we.
Speaker B:We do it.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And what was great from my point of view is that the.
Speaker B:The, you know, they weren't precious, so they were very welcoming of my contribution.
Speaker B:You know, they.
Speaker B:There was no problem, you know, it was like they were happy for that, you know.
Speaker B:And so I was able to bring some things into play.
Speaker B:Like, you know, some of the indie aspects, you know, like.
Speaker B:So the first track on the Crew from the North, I mean, it was Sample City, that album.
Speaker B:Absolutely.
Speaker B:We would never get it cleared if we were trying to put that album out now.
Speaker B:Not a chance in hell.
Speaker B:Even like within the opening few seconds you've had.
Speaker B:You've had one of them's not like an official sample, which was the guy who worked in the studio says call Blimey Wears Up North.
Speaker B:That's Paul Roberts, who is the engineer.
Speaker B:And it's.
Speaker B:But this is the Killer speaking and the guitar.
Speaker B:So you've got Jerry Lee Lewis, this is the Killer speaking.
Speaker B:You've got the guitar from Jimi Hendrix in the background.
Speaker B:And then you've got Ringo, which is Sam from Revolution Number nine, I think, saying, Take this, brother, may it serve you well, that's just within those opening.
Speaker B:And then you drop into the beats.
Speaker B:And what.
Speaker B:What the beats are is Happy Mondays, right?
Speaker B:Sampling nwa, you know.
Speaker B:So now we've sampled the Happy Mondays and that's what we use for the background for Crew from the north, you know.
Speaker B:And so.
Speaker B:And that we sampled wfl the Happy Mondays and which.
Speaker B:That kind of Manchester Connection again straight away.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And so throughout the whole album, I mean, there's just so much sample.
Speaker B:I mean, it's loads of little bits.
Speaker B:I mean, there's.
Speaker B:Even the beats from sergeant Pepper are underneath a track called the Jungle.
Speaker A:Is that the Reprise?
Speaker A:Yes, Reprise.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:So, you know, like it was just like a field day, you know, we just.
Speaker B:We never thought about sample clearance.
Speaker B:We got to a point where EMI started to come to us and say it was like people in the legal department had listened to the album and got and spotted something.
Speaker B:And there was a couple of things we had to change.
Speaker B:The one that the worst thing was that I wanted to use the Steppenwolf version of Born to Be Wild and.
Speaker B:And John K from Steppenwolf completely refused it.
Speaker B:And so I ended up using the Slade version.
Speaker B:Slade did a live version, so that's the one that we had on the album.
Speaker B:Although they did a release and I kind of sneaked the Separable back in the.
Speaker B:They did like a Reissue like not long ago.
Speaker B:So it was getting to a point where the floodgates were going to open and all of a sudden we were going to have to be trying and.
Speaker B:And I got called into EMI and basically told, look, go in the studio.
Speaker B:You know, we can say that you've changed something.
Speaker B:You know, it's almost like, go ahead and do it.
Speaker B:But we were, you know, we won't say anything, but don't say that I said anything.
Speaker B:It was.
Speaker B:It was a nice thing that was.
Speaker B:Was handed over, really.
Speaker B:I won't say who enable that.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:But they just basically put the block on checking for the samples.
Speaker B:They said to the people who are asking, oh, he's gone back in the studio to sort that out.
Speaker B:And we just put it out as it was anyway, apart from the.
Speaker B:The few things that we did have to change.
Speaker A:That's amazing because presumably that's after the Della Soul Turtles one.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:I mean, just after that, that was the domain that we were in.
Speaker B:And remember, at that point with Della Soul, there hadn't been the big court case.
Speaker B:I mean, they'd done that album and obviously, again, you know, it was.
Speaker B:There was a lot of comparisons made.
Speaker B:The musically was different, but in terms of spirit and where we were coming from and the fact we were taking all these different sources.
Speaker B:I remember when I first heard the De La Soul album, Ian Dewhurst, who was the guy who worked Island Records, he.
Speaker B:I mean, he wasn't island by this time, but he obviously was aware of the rap assassin.
Speaker B:He'd been to New York and he brought a copy back.
Speaker B:Remember, he came to my house, my flat in.
Speaker B:In London and brought that album and I.
Speaker B:I run it off onto a cassette at the time, and I was just like, whoa, you know, just like this.
Speaker B:And because he.
Speaker B:He'd seen the comparison in the way he thought that, yeah, you're doing, you know, you're kind of.
Speaker B:And I was just like, blown away, obviously, because it's one of the greatest, you know, of all hip hop albums.
Speaker B:I remember even giving a cassette to our A and R guy at TMI and trying to say to him this, you know, because they were always trying to push us in a slight.
Speaker B:The.
Speaker B:The amount of times we heard the term hip house wanting to do a hip house mix.
Speaker B:And the guys were like, we're not into it.
Speaker B:We don't like it.
Speaker B:We don't want to hear about.
Speaker B:We're not into hip house.
Speaker B:You know, like.
Speaker B:And I fought their corner all the time.
Speaker B:So there was never a hip house mix.
Speaker B:You Know, but I was always being pressured, you know, you know, do this.
Speaker B:And what, what led to the downfall of it all was that our relative success with the first album, which had massive acclaim across the board, across the black music press, the rock press, everything, you know, but not the radio.
Speaker B:But we were with a marketing department called Strategic in emi who, who dealt with specialist labels, be it dance, jazz, classical and back catalog.
Speaker B:They did, you know, they're quite lucrative because some of this back catalog could sell a lot.
Speaker B:And so they had money and it was great.
Speaker B:And they let us get on with it.
Speaker B:We did all our own press, you know, we did all the artwork.
Speaker B:Brian Cannon, who later became Oasis's artwork, was, was the guy who did all, all our stuff, you know, with the Rap Assassins.
Speaker B:That's where he got his start from.
Speaker B:And so we had a real control base over what we were doing.
Speaker B:We had creative control, which is mad, you know, we actually had creative control.
Speaker B:But when we did the second album, the main EMI marketing department, by that point it spotted us, you know, we'd done something and so they took us over.
Speaker B:And the big problem was that they thought they had some kind of authority on rap music because two American singles that belong to Capital, the EMI had the rights over and put out and were big hits.
Speaker B:Here were MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice.
Speaker B:So they felt now we, you know, where we know all about, you know, we've had rap hits and everything.
Speaker B:And they didn't have the conception that this was not what the Rap Assassins were into.
Speaker B:The Rap Assassin didn't have respect for MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice.
Speaker B:That was throwaway stuff to them.
Speaker B:They had respect for Public Enemy or NWA or ever it might be, you know, they were like into serious American artists and this was like the pop end of the market.
Speaker B:So EMI marketing department immediately were trying to push us more into a direction that they could work with, I suppose that they understood how to work with.
Speaker B:And what they got was the absolute opposite of that.
Speaker B:You know, the guys, the second album, very critical about radio, very hardcore in.
Speaker B:In certain ways uncompromising, no, you know, obvious kind of single type hits.
Speaker B:I, I mean, I knew when they'd done it, I thought I.
Speaker B:I absolutely backed everything about, you know, the, Their expression that they should express.
Speaker B: expressed from the aspect of: Speaker B:It was what was happening in Manchester, the, The kind of peace and love period it was over.
Speaker B:Madchester now was good, Gunchester it was darker, it was bleaker.
Speaker B:And the two albums reflect that.
Speaker B:The killer Album being the, you know, the Brights and.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And the Think album being more towards the dark side.
Speaker B:But I just knew there that.
Speaker B:That they're not gonna.
Speaker B:They're not gonna like this.
Speaker B:They're not gonna want this.
Speaker B:It's not what they're looking for.
Speaker B:And that proved to be true, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So through this time were you doing other sort of re edit work or anything like that?
Speaker B:No, I mean, not re editing stuff.
Speaker B:I mean I did the odd bit and Bob a bit a remix here and there, a bit of production here and there, but all scattered and you know, nothing coherent.
Speaker B:I could get a grip.
Speaker B:I mean remember I'd really tried to get remix in when I was still a DJ and it was very difficult.
Speaker B:Eventually Mute Records, Daniel Miller came through with a remix for me.
Speaker B:But it was.
Speaker B:I would have hoped it would have been Depeche Mode or, or Yazoo, you know, but it was bang called I start counting.
Speaker B:So, you know, just little things here and there that I did but couldn't find my.
Speaker B:Couldn't get it get.
Speaker B:You know, get my stance in the whole situation.
Speaker B:It was just difficult.
Speaker B:As I say, you were at a time as well where you had to book studios and things, you know, if you wanted to make a track.
Speaker B:It was costly, you know.
Speaker B:And yeah, you have to get musicians and so you kind of learning in public in a way, you know, you weren't, you know, you just having to do whatever you could along the way.
Speaker B:But as I say, the Rap Assassins came into play and that became, you know, my main.
Speaker B:My main source of what I was doing.
Speaker B:And that was a five year period.
Speaker B:Re edits didn't really come back into play till I started up DJing again and right realized that now there was this re edits culture that was emerging and you know, by serendipity is exactly what I was doing when I stopped DJing because I'd got a Reeboks B77.
Speaker B:I was doing my mixes for radio.
Speaker B:I started to be fancy with the editing on that and doing all sorts of little bits of tricks and stuff.
Speaker B:So that was slowing down the process of making a mix rather than being as live.
Speaker B:It was now taking eight hours.
Speaker B:That seemed a hell of a long time then now, you know, you can go on forever, you know, people because of the equipment that they've got.
Speaker B:And so I started doing some edits actually for radio.
Speaker B:And it was for weirdly a guy called Timmy Mallet.
Speaker B:Do you remember him?
Speaker B:It's Mallet wackaday.
Speaker A:Yeah, he's Someone I want to try and get on here.
Speaker B:Oh really?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:I got in touch and he was having.
Speaker A:I sent him a message and he was like, yeah, but no, because he broke the news about Leonard Lennon being shot, didn't he?
Speaker B:On his radio show on, on Piccadilly, quite, quite lightly.
Speaker B:I mean he had this amazing.
Speaker B:I mean he was later known, you know, like being a kiddies type personality and bit daft and everything.
Speaker B:It always was, you know, he always had that kind of vibe about with glasses.
Speaker B:But he did this show for teenagers that was absolutely brilliant.
Speaker B:He'd get people in to make jingles and stuff.
Speaker B:He'd have.
Speaker B:Chris Evans was on it.
Speaker B:He was called Nobby no Level.
Speaker B:He was like his roving reporter.
Speaker B:He'd kind of knock on people's doors and pass a message from a girl that fancied a lad or something.
Speaker B:You know, we all this.
Speaker B:It was just this like it was all happening and he got me to do some, you know, asked me to.
Speaker B:To do some edits for the show.
Speaker B:So I did Frankie goes Hollywood 2 Tribe did, you know, stuff that was known.
Speaker B:And I did it also because I thought the, the record companies, if they could hear what I did in an edit, they might, you know, let me do a proper remix and give me a multi track.
Speaker B: credits of the eddie album in: Speaker B:And you know, Squishy Polity would be again that ended up on the credits of the edit album.
Speaker B:So all these, I call them turntable edits.
Speaker B:I made them with two turntables so I'd use repeat effects from the turntables.
Speaker B:I had a cassette that sometimes I could put a little kind of sample from and I had tape effects, like dub effects and stuff.
Speaker B:And I just made these edits of tracks, you know, off that.
Speaker B:So years later, now I'm opening up to the possibility of coming back into DJing again.
Speaker B:I've got a computer now.
Speaker B:I've been online.
Speaker B:I can see that there's websites that are dealing with like dance history and culture and everything.
Speaker B:There are forums where people are discussing this.
Speaker B:I start to join a few of the forums and people start to kind of.
Speaker B:I.
Speaker B:I also started electro funk routes which was the big thing.
Speaker B:I got the website and now, you know, people are saying about DJing and stuff.
Speaker B:So what, what kind of.
Speaker B:When I decided to come back into DJ in I was aware that, I mean it was still very underground at the time, the re edits.
Speaker B:But it was there and it's.
Speaker B:It absolutely fitted exactly what I wanted to do.
Speaker B:I didn't want to be Mr.
Speaker B:Nostalgia playing the old tunes that I used to play back in the day, but at the same time I wanted to draw from back in the day.
Speaker B:And now here we are.
Speaker B:This.
Speaker B:I can make edits.
Speaker B:There are other people who are making edits that are taking some of these tracks.
Speaker B:And, and, and that was the, that, that, that, that seemed to fit the condition that I'd set within myself of a kind of past, present balance.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:So now I'm DJing.
Speaker B:I'm using a reel to reel, which is an old antiquated piece of equipment, alongside a laptop, which is modern technology.
Speaker B:So it's the juxtaposition of the two, you know, that I, I always started to look for that.
Speaker B:So a re edit is that it's taken from the past, but it's doing it in a contemporary way that suits being played now and the dance floor and the mixing and everything.
Speaker B:So, you know, that, that became a, some, almost a guideline for me that whenever something new came in, I often looked at those two aspects and are they both there for me?
Speaker B:Yeah, that works then, you know, because I didn't want to be kind of pulled into a nostalgia trap, which is very easy, you know, and be.
Speaker B:Oh, yeah, that's the guy used to do Hacienda or, you know.
Speaker B:Yeah, I've seen him, he's.
Speaker B:He's all right, you know, onto the next one.
Speaker B:I needed to cultivate an audience to.
Speaker B:If I was going to go into a second career as a dj, I had to cultivate an audience who are younger, you know, you can't rely on people of, you know, my age or Even back then, 20 years ago, it would have been in the 40s because they got families, they don't go out as much, you know.
Speaker B:So, yeah, you need to hit people who are wanting to go out more often and everything.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:So we never actually talked about the Hacienda in the first episode, but obviously that's something that people kind of associate you with.
Speaker A:So when was it that you were there and like, what was it like?
Speaker B:So I was there in 83, so the club by that point had been open.
Speaker B:It opened in May 82.
Speaker B:It was a big space in the winter, it's freezing cold in the summer, you know, the light shone through, you know, like the, from the roof and everything.
Speaker B:So it was light till kind of, you know, the acoustics in the place were terrible.
Speaker B:The place looked great, you know, obviously the design, we've all seen it, but acoustically it was, it was.
Speaker B:And it was not set up properly for a DJ when it started because they put the DJ booth in a room to the side of the stage, down some stairs, which meant you looked through a glass slat and saw people's legs if there were people in there, you know, because they struggled to put people in there for quite a long time.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:And I, I won't even go into the mixer.
Speaker B:That, that was like above your head.
Speaker B:I mean, honestly, you, I.
Speaker B:You couldn't credit what they did.
Speaker B:You know, they went in with the best intentions, but they just didn't have it sussed at all.
Speaker B:Early doors, they got it right when they moved the DJ move to the balcony and bit by bit it all came together and now we know the history.
Speaker B:But at my time there, it was a struggle and we had some really good one off nights.
Speaker B:I was doing the Friday nights, but they had a membership issue which was hard to get people in.
Speaker B:They had the issue with the fact that the black crowd simply thought the Hacienda was not their club.
Speaker B:They thought this was all indie, indie kids and students and stuff.
Speaker B:And, and they had nothing to do with their experience.
Speaker B:And you know, it was, as I say, it was a club like struggling to find its identity.
Speaker B:And, and, and yeah, we had these great one off nights.
Speaker B:But all, you know, I mean, even though I did the Friday night, they'd say to me, oh, yeah, we got.
Speaker B:We can't do this Friday or that Friday because we've already got a band pre booked in.
Speaker B:So it's all staggered and it just wasn't right.
Speaker B:But yeah, what, what was really important about that time was I also did an hour on the Saturday night, which was to acclimatize my Friday night audience to the type of music because Saturday night was busy.
Speaker B:Like most clubs have a busy night on a Saturday night.
Speaker B:So that was their one busy night.
Speaker B:I did it with a guy called John Tracy and I did an hour and Broken Glass, the break dancers would come in with me and they dance on the stage.
Speaker B:And this was at the point where they were really, you know, loved.
Speaker B:It was the kind of the genesis of this happening in this country.
Speaker B:And so they, they were like the Hacienda lot adored them and everything.
Speaker B:So they even call them the Hacienda Break Dancers on certain things.
Speaker B:And so.
Speaker B:And they, and they appeared on the tube of Marcel king in early 84.
Speaker B:And I think what the, the assassin, what, what I think what Broken Glass did was they gave the club for the first time, a proper credibility with the young black crowd that they now may think, oh, they might go to something at the Hacienda.
Speaker B:Whereas before they just would have swerved.
Speaker B:It didn't seem like, you know.
Speaker B:And so I think that they planted seeds in that way, you know, at that point.
Speaker B:Because later with the Friday night, Mike Pickering took it over in 85 and then that became Nude Nights and he did it with a guy called Martin Pendergrass and they, they djed under MP Squared.
Speaker B:MP with the two small two MP Squared.
Speaker B:And he, he, he basically took the kind of similar format to what we were doing on the black scene in terms of.
Speaker B:It was the best of black, you know.
Speaker B:So when he was playing in 85, 86, some of those early house tracks started getting played.
Speaker B:But there was also kind of Latin stuff, street soul, hip hop, you know, disco.
Speaker B:It was like a, a wide remit of black music similar to how it was on in the black clubs.
Speaker B:And, and it was the black crowd that started to come into the Hacienda at that time because of the dance floor.
Speaker B:They, they had a big dance floor and it wasn't, you know, like Sardine pack then, you know, so there's plenty of dance space people.
Speaker B:Like a guy called Gerald, Gerald Simpson was, was one of the kids that went in there and Foot Patrol, who were a favorite group.
Speaker B:I mean, Gerald, I always, I mean, God knows how many times I've told this story.
Speaker B:But it's.
Speaker B:There's no better example really because it kind of tells what happened at the Hacienda because there's an assumption, I would imagine from many people that a guy called Gerald does this track, Voodoo Ray, after he goes to this club called the Hacienda and has an epiphany hearing this house music.
Speaker B:That's how I think a lot of people assume that he hears this house music, that's the end and he goes home and does voodoo, right?
Speaker B:But really it's Gerald who was bringing the house music in in the first place.
Speaker B:And his contemporaries and people like Foot Patrol and other kids, they were the kids that were bringing it there in the first place.
Speaker B:And in fact, if you look at Voodoo Ray, yeah, I mean it's, it's seen as a house track, but you can off air the jazz funk influences in there and the kind of electro side of it.
Speaker B:And this is Gerald's background.
Speaker B:It was Gerald's kind of, it was his take on all this.
Speaker B:It's not an orthodox house track in the way that we know it's such an individualistic track and unique.
Speaker B:But knowing Gerald, knowing his background as initially a jazz dancer, you know, he was one of the kids who came in and danced to jazz and then, you know, he was into kind of the electronic music, the electro that came out.
Speaker B:He started DJing and he worked with MC tunes were called the Scratch Beat Masters.
Speaker B:They were a hip hop crew.
Speaker B:And this was like just before Voodoo Ray and everything.
Speaker B:So his influences were all coming from that direction.
Speaker B:It wasn't, you know, it certainly wasn't that he got this from the Hacienda, you know, it was him and guys like him that were going there that was bringing this vibe into the Hacienda in the first place.
Speaker A:Yeah, I suppose this comes into the sort of folklore around the Hacienda, doesn't it?
Speaker A:And like, because you, because you were known as having been at the Hacienda, then did.
Speaker A:Was that kind of almost like a monkey on your back when you were coming back?
Speaker B:When I came back, I actually would tell people not to put Hacienda under my name in flyers.
Speaker B:Yeah, I played it right down.
Speaker B:And the reason I did that was because I didn't want it to overshadow Legend, because Legend would be such an amazing club.
Speaker B:And you know, the, I, I, it was, I'm, you know, Yeah, I played at the Hacienda, but I'm a, I'm a Legend.
Speaker B:That's my club.
Speaker B:That's where my greatest moments were spent.
Speaker B:Yeah, Legend.
Speaker B:So I didn't want it.
Speaker B:It's easy for people.
Speaker B:Hacienda, everyone knows it.
Speaker B:I don't mind now.
Speaker B:I change the attitude over time.
Speaker B:I do a lot of Hacienda events and, and everything and it's great, you know, but in that initial period, I just didn't want to, because I've seen other DJs do that who were at the Hacienda for 10 minutes and it's Hacienda, DJ Hacienda.
Speaker B:You know, it's like the kind of.
Speaker B:Whereas, you know, you know.
Speaker B:Yeah, you were more associated with this or that or that, you know, and I certainly wanted to make sure Legend, people knew about Legend and, and Wigan Pier as well, and, and that whole scene of what was going on.
Speaker B:Because to get the story in context, you needed all these pieces put into the proper places.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So when you went back to DJing, was it, was it scary going back?
Speaker B:No, I mean, you know, I'm not a kind of person who's got nerves about it so much.
Speaker B:Apart from hoping all the equipment set up right.
Speaker B:You know, I could be Quite quiet before a gig, just checking everything's in place.
Speaker B:But I'm not someone who kind of has nerves and stuff like that.
Speaker B:I don't know.
Speaker B:I mean, when I did come back into All Happened Organically, I did my first gig in Manchester and it was Danny Webb and a guy that he was working with, Danny Webb worked for Piccadilly Records and he said, you know, let's do something in Manchester.
Speaker B:And he seemed the right guy and it seemed the right moment.
Speaker B:And I'd started the website Electro Funk Routes and I actually did for about six months prior to that, might have even been a bit more.
Speaker B:I did a little residency in Liverpool.
Speaker B:But no, didn't say who I was or anything.
Speaker B:I just.
Speaker B:It was just a bar residency and it was purely.
Speaker B:Purely to get used to the controller that I bought this PC DJ controller that I used.
Speaker B:So I was using that with the laptop in conjunction with it.
Speaker B:And I initially thought I'd only go there for a couple of months and then I got used to like having some money in my pocket for the first time in years, you know, I hadn't, you know, even like, I think probably only about 100 quid or something, you know, but it was great, you know, Jesus.
Speaker B:And, and so I, you know, it was under the condition.
Speaker B:No, you know, I just want to keep this totally on the down low, you know, and, and, and get into it.
Speaker B:So I, you know, I was comfortable with the equipment and everything by that point and I did that first night in, in Manchester and there were less than 100 there, but they were the right people.
Speaker B:They were all kind of trained spotters and DJs and stuff.
Speaker B:And they were coming up, what's this record?
Speaker B: ka Khan edit that I'd made in: Speaker B:It's is great.
Speaker B:This, wow.
Speaker B:And I'm like, I wish you would have been saying this 20 years ago when I was trying to get remix work now.
Speaker B:I mean, it blew me away.
Speaker B:I was like, now, now they get it now they get it at the time, you know, like people look the other way a bit.
Speaker B:Like when they do that tube perform, which you see the people in the crowd, it's like, let's go put a band on.
Speaker B:You know, what's this madness?
Speaker B:So you know, that that's what it was like, that's how it worked out, really.
Speaker A:So then did the work sort of come quite quickly?
Speaker B:Well, what happened was that that gig was attended by Ralph Lawson from Back to Basics.
Speaker B:And there was a guy called Richard Harcastle there who was from a club in Sheffield, it was called Society Scuba and both of them, but got me booked for.
Speaker B:So within my next few gigs, I did Back to Basics, I did Sheffield.
Speaker B:From Sheffield I got a Newcastle gig and this is what was happening.
Speaker B:I was getting gigs from gigs and they were multiplying.
Speaker B:So initially for that first period of maybe 12 months, I was doing all my own bookings and they were just coming in organically and it was just starting to build and build.
Speaker B:And then I had people approach me about agents were.
Speaker B:I mean, in fact, it was when I did the credit edit to Sav, who was behind that, he had also a DJ agency.
Speaker B:And I, I actually declined at that point.
Speaker B:I just said, to be honest, I'm, I'm fine where I am.
Speaker B:I'll come, I'll.
Speaker B:I'll come to you if I need you, you know, like.
Speaker B:But I could handle everything at the time and I thought it was the personable side of it was working for me, the direct connection with people at the time.
Speaker B:But then it gets to a point where you get an.
Speaker B:Overseas things and inquiries and stuff and it was like the right time to get an agent involved because they can do all the logistics if you travel, you've just got to worry about your gig.
Speaker B:They will make sure everything's, everything else is in place.
Speaker B:And so.
Speaker B:So yeah, that whole first period, it just went on and even for years after that, for maybe, you know, many years after that, I always used to think, when's it going to plateau?
Speaker B:You know, when does this plateau?
Speaker B:And it wasn't, it was always moving upwards.
Speaker B:I mean, in the end it did kind of plateau in a sense with, with COVID it was a, an enforced plateau that all of a sudden we were in four, you know, we're out of the game for close on two years, you know, and so I think a lot of people at that time would have gone down with that.
Speaker B:A lot of DJs probably who DJ'd before that haven't DJ'd since or done.
Speaker B:The odd thing, it changed the whole dynamic and.
Speaker B:But fortunately, you know, I was able to come out the other side of that and still, you know, like the bookings come in.
Speaker B:I'm, you know, I'm still in a fortunate position, you know, although that was, you know, wasn't nice not not being able to, you know, get any kind of assistance for two years that all, all the money that you've.
Speaker B:You've earned over the period.
Speaker B:The period before now is being used to get you through this time.
Speaker B:You know, that was your rainy day.
Speaker B:Money is this was.
Speaker B:That was the rainy day, I suppose, you know, we had the rainy day.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker A:So with the remixing, you get a lot of work through that nowadays, don't you?
Speaker A:As well.
Speaker A:Did that come in parallel with the, with the growth of the DJ and.
Speaker A:Or did that kind of have its own track?
Speaker B:No, that.
Speaker B:That came in parallel with the growth of the DJ and really, you know, that, you know, when your name starts getting around, people get in touch with you and ask for remixes and stuff.
Speaker B:And so I mean, I don't do.
Speaker B:I.
Speaker B:I, you know, I, I kind of.
Speaker B:I'm quite choosy over what I want to do.
Speaker B:You know, maybe if you slip through the net and you think, you know, shouldn't, shouldn't perhaps have done that one.
Speaker B:But.
Speaker B:But you know, most of the time, you know, right.
Speaker B:Really happy with.
Speaker B:With the tracks that we're working with and so is there any.
Speaker A:Any particular one that you wish you'd done that you were offered?
Speaker B:Not really, no.
Speaker B:I don't think so.
Speaker B:I think what I've been offered, I've always, you know, I mean, the, the only time sometimes there's a term called on specific where you do it, you do the mix and then if they like it, they'll.
Speaker B:They'll pay for it.
Speaker B:And I, I wouldn't do that.
Speaker B:I would never do on spec until Grace Jones.
Speaker B:She had a track called William's Blood and, And like loads of people had a shot at it and I thought, okay, I'll do it.
Speaker B:And I got it.
Speaker B:I got the mix and she put it out and everything and so.
Speaker B:So that worked out, you know.
Speaker B:But generally, you know, I wouldn't have done, you know, I mean, with remixing you don't get much out of it.
Speaker B:Now.
Speaker B: s like if you were remixer in: Speaker B:If you had your head properly screwed on and had, you know, a lawyer and something, you're probably getting points off each of the records and things like that.
Speaker B:So it was a very lucrative business, you know, for DJs to become remixes.
Speaker B:That's all went once.
Speaker B:Vinyl kind of went on the downturn and everything.
Speaker B:There's this.
Speaker B:This not nothing, you know, there's not big money in that at all.
Speaker B:You know, it's so often it's a calling card for people.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:Keeps the name current.
Speaker B:Or whatever, you know.
Speaker B:Yeah, so you know that.
Speaker B:So you can't go and make a career out of being a remixer really.
Speaker A:Now is it nice though, the feeling of just getting like you were talking before about just wanting to get access to the multi tracks.
Speaker A:Is it nice to be at that point or to when you felt, you know, when you reached that point where someone was like for the first time is the multi tracks go for it?
Speaker B:Well, yeah, I mean it is, you know you have like weird situations.
Speaker B:I got to remix in about.
Speaker B:What would it be about 88 yellow, the Swiss band who I loved and the track called the Race, I got to do that.
Speaker B:But I was given like, you know what they wanted, they wanted this sports mix they wanted me to sample from sporting events and stuff, you know, and, and the end I had to find, you know, try and source some stuff and get in the studio with it and I wasn't like to, I, I just wanted to do a great 12 inch mix but they were like, it ended up coming out on 7 inch and they've kind of pushed me into this sports.
Speaker B:But the big thing was that in the studio it was a 48 track studio so 24 track machines.
Speaker B:So like they had two machines and what you do is you put both tapes on there and you sync them up and everything and there's your 48 track.
Speaker B:So they've got 48 track studio but three tapes turn up.
Speaker B:So this, there's not 48 tracks, there's 72 tracks and I haven't got a third machine.
Speaker B:So I'm having to make a decision on the day which, which multi track I'm not going to use.
Speaker B:So I could only use two of them.
Speaker B:So you know, you're hamstrung and things like that and you're not in a position where you can say oh let's come back in, you know, next week because they'll be.
Speaker B:Or tomorrow because they're saying oh the studio's booked up or oh no, we need it back today.
Speaker B:And, and so you kind of find yourself in situations like that where I did a remix of Yellow but it was really personally really disappointing to me because it wasn't what I wanted to do.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:But you know, like now we're in a different place because we've got computers and we've got all the time we need with these things and unlimited tracks.
Speaker B:We're not kind of restrained to a 40, a 24 track machine or a foot or two of them or even like, I mean The Beatles recorded Sgt.
Speaker B:Peppers on eight tracks.
Speaker B:Is that mad?
Speaker B:Yeah, you know, it's absolutely insane, you know, and, and.
Speaker B:But people now need an infinite amount of tracks and, you know, they need an infinite amount of.
Speaker B:They need everything before they can even start.
Speaker B:You know, sometimes it's better to strip it all back down to basics.
Speaker B:And I think that people find a lot more creative in that way if they, if they set conditions on themselves and, and don't give them, you know, say I am gonna do something tonight, not I'm gonna do something in the next month.
Speaker B:And that's how people have started thinking about, like, when they're making records and tracks because they can go back and forth between the computer forever, you know, they.
Speaker B:And I think that, as I say that that has the risk of stifling the whole creative project and process.
Speaker B:It's, it's that you need to really build in a spontaneity into that.
Speaker B:That's the performance.
Speaker B:So when in the early 80s in New York, all these amazing remixes like Francois Kavorkin, Larry Levanti, Scott, Jelly Bean Bonita, Shep Pettibone, all these great names, all from the DJ community, often they were getting overnight sessions, they were kind of getting what's called downtime when, when the studio would sell hours to them cheap, they were going in overnight and they were doing the mix and they only had that amount of time to do the mix.
Speaker B:And I listened back to some of those early 80s mixtures and they're so creative and they've got such a vibe about them.
Speaker B:I think the vibe is to do with them being.
Speaker B:They had to be spontaneous.
Speaker B:And so what they do in there, they get it all set up, get the mix right with what's on the multi track, get it the way they want it sounding, and then they'd start to strip down.
Speaker B:So they'd maybe run a version off without any drums.
Speaker B:Maybe they'd run one with just the drums, maybe with the bass and drums and they run all these onto tape and then they go home and edit those together.
Speaker B:So that, that was the whole process.
Speaker B:Then they couldn't go back to, you know, the multi track and keep going and going and getting more bits.
Speaker B:Once they've been in that studio overnight and pulled as much as they could, as many options and possibilities, that's what they, they did.
Speaker B:And then they edited the mix together at the end of the day, you know, and.
Speaker B:And those mixes still stand in terms of excitement and originality and vitality.
Speaker B:So, you know, I think I always try to, to.
Speaker B:I always feel my best Work comes in that way when that burst, you know, that you burst into a creative pattern, you know, like, and, and it's done quickly.
Speaker B:I mean, I actually, I did a, a kind of mashup, a kind of track that I did yesterday.
Speaker B:Just sat down and it was done within eight hours.
Speaker B:You know, the idea just.
Speaker B:And, and it worked perfectly.
Speaker B:And it's going to be really good.
Speaker B:I know it's, it's, you know, I'm already feeling that it's, it's, it's spot on.
Speaker B:It's what exactly what, you know, like kind of thing I want to be making.
Speaker B:And I don't think it would have been the same if I would have taken a week over it.
Speaker B:I think you squeeze the life out of things you make, you sanitize things too much, you're too particular.
Speaker B:But I was just throwing stuff onto, on, you know, into the computer, you know, throwing onto the tracks and adding things and, and, you know, it's very quick, very spontaneous.
Speaker B:And then you sit away from it and you go, I like that because it's got the vibe.
Speaker B:It's got the vibe you're after.
Speaker B:And, and I think that's the hardest thing to find in a record.
Speaker B:You know, we, we hear it, we know when, you know, we know the.
Speaker B:But, you know, you can't like just manufacture that.
Speaker B:It's got to be.
Speaker B:It's a human thing.
Speaker B:It's an emotional thing.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And just to that point as well.
Speaker A:Perfection is the enemy of done.
Speaker A:That's what they say, isn't it?
Speaker A:Something that we've not really got into the detail of in the episode that I'd like to understand more of is the, the workflow when you're live using the Reavox reel to reel.
Speaker B:Well, basically what I'm doing this.
Speaker B:There's kind of a couple of things to it, but the, the main thing that I'm doing generally is I've got all sorts of sounds, effects, kind of samples, you know, little bits of voice kind of whooshes recorded and separated on the tape.
Speaker B:So I can kind of spin them in over the top of what I'm playing from the CDJs.
Speaker B:So that's what I'm doing.
Speaker B:I'm kind of peppering the, what I'm mixing as I'm working through it.
Speaker B:The second thing is that you can put it into, into record and feed it back through itself.
Speaker B:And that creates like dub effects, the, the original kind of tape dub effects.
Speaker B:How they, you know, the Jamaicans first kind of invented dub.
Speaker B:It was like playing with tapes and making noises, you know, and so you can do a bit of that as well.
Speaker B:So that's, that's my main uses of, of the Reeboks.
Speaker B:It kind of is basically there just to help spice up, you know, what I'm.
Speaker B:I'm doing like on a DJing level.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So when you're doing edits now, because a couple of your edits I've used recently on mixes, they've just got this kind of real nice warmth to them.
Speaker A:Are you working on analog gear when you're doing them?
Speaker B:No.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Not now.
Speaker B:I mean, obviously back in the day you would do.
Speaker B:And I did my original edits on tape, but once computers came along, it just made things so much quicker.
Speaker B:So for example, if back then I wanted to extend say a two bar section and make that into 16 bars, for example, I had to, you know, record that 16 times, or if it was two bar section for 16 bars, eight times.
Speaker B:So each time was a process of recording and then editing and putting the bits together.
Speaker B:Recording, editing, putting the bits together until you make that section.
Speaker B:Whereas with a computer you select those two bars and you put multiply by eight.
Speaker B:Bingo.
Speaker B:It's done.
Speaker B:You know, you've immediately done it.
Speaker B:So there's no practical purpose for editing on tape.
Speaker B:You know, maybe there's a kind of nostalgia or this, you know, aesthetics side of it, you know, if somebody wanted to do that.
Speaker B:But really, you know, practically for making edits now, you can do everything so much, so much quicker.
Speaker A:Are you using like outboard, outboard effects and stuff?
Speaker A:Already doing everything in the box.
Speaker B:When I'm re.
Speaker B:Editing.
Speaker B:I mean, if you go back to tape, I mean, it's literally you're taking the track, the stereo track, and you're editing it.
Speaker B:You know, you're either extending it or you're reducing it, or you're trying to take out certain bits of it that you don't think work so well and using the other stuff instead.
Speaker B:So it's really just taking what's there and rearranging it.
Speaker B:So that's, that's an edit, but it moves forward from that.
Speaker B:It becomes like more like a rework.
Speaker B:So now people will add bottom end to it.
Speaker B:They might add a kick drum or you know, percussion or obviously bass and stuff and just make the track sonically, you know, fit in more with.
Speaker B:With what's happening now, you know, so, so you've got like the, the edit is just using the original track.
Speaker B:That's all you've got to work with.
Speaker B:The rework starts to kind of take it further and add spits.
Speaker B:It's now adding bits into it and everything.
Speaker B:And then obviously a remix is when you have the actual multi track parts of, of the track you remix in.
Speaker B:And then you know, you can look at everything individually.
Speaker B:So a rework still takes, you know, the, the original track, but it builds into that.
Speaker B:It kind of builds stuff around it got it.
Speaker B:So there's different aspects of it.
Speaker B:But as I said when I first started editing, that's all it was.
Speaker B:It was just kind of working with something in stereo and cutting it up for your purposes really.
Speaker A:So we kind of can't move for edits these days.
Speaker A:It's almost like an edit demic and there's a huge variation in quality.
Speaker A:What are your thoughts on the edit scene today given your history with them?
Speaker B:I mean originally edits were done in New York in the 70s and the DJs did those and they played them off reel to reel tape so that they had exclusive versions of tracks.
Speaker B:And then they might share them or they might kind of press up, you know, a few acetates.
Speaker B:And it was very kind of low key in that sense and very much happening just in.
Speaker B:Well, probably with it with a certain amount of DJs in New York club land.
Speaker B:So it didn't really kind of come into the UK.
Speaker B:Even when I was editing in the early 80s, the penny had never fully dropped in terms of what had been happening in New York that people were doing this.
Speaker B:In fact, a lot of the techniques I kind of learned and I only learned them doing it, you know, nobody taught me how to do it.
Speaker B:I just worked it out for myself.
Speaker B:You realize these techniques were used in New York.
Speaker B:They stumbled across the same techniques themselves.
Speaker B:It's just that I was doing this quite a way later.
Speaker B:You know, I mean the edit scene in the UK really started off in the kind of 90s and various people were doing stuff, bringing back like disco tracks also kind of, you know, drawing from the, the hip hop break beats and stuff like that.
Speaker B:You know, Ron Hardy, the Chicago DJ was a big influence to some people, the edits that they were doing out there.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:So the re edit scene kind of came in at that point but really accelerated, you know, into the new millennium because of the computer technology.
Speaker B:Yeah, and the fact that anybody can do this now, as I said to you, it, what, what, what used to be a very difficult process, you know, working on a tape and with strands of tape now you can do in a computer in no time.
Speaker B:So yeah, people nowadays make edits for themselves, which is great.
Speaker B:You know, that's fine.
Speaker B:Sometimes some of the edits that get out there, so to speak, it's like there isn't that kind of quality control.
Speaker B:And you know, when you, you know, the people that are really doing it at a high level and the energy and the effort they're putting into doing this, you can tell, you can hear when it's somebody who's just really found a track, an older track, you know, like you say, maybe extended the intro a bit, which is.
Speaker B:Is good for mixing purposes and, and, and giving it an outro so you can get out of the track.
Speaker B:Because a lot of those older tracks just faded out and they weren't thinking of it in, in that.
Speaker B:In these terms.
Speaker B:So you know that that's, that's fine.
Speaker B:But like you say some of these end up.
Speaker B:There's loads of records and stuff and, and you know, this debatable quality to, to.
Speaker B:To what the, the people are doing.
Speaker B:Although there are people out there who do great work, you know.
Speaker B:But a lot of those have kind of moved more into Reworks now.
Speaker B:I think that they're more.
Speaker B:It's a much more cultured approach to it and you know that they're almost remixing the track but they haven't got the multi.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:In fact now it's going another level because of AI that you can separate stuff within AI.
Speaker B:And so people are now going to be able to get into the multi tracks.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:You know, and I mean an interesting thing was that one of the reasons that a lot of these kind of stems of tracks started coming out was again it, you know, like the Beatles are there with that.
Speaker B:It's, you know, the.
Speaker B:What was it called?
Speaker B:Rock.
Speaker B:What was the game?
Speaker B:We had all the instruments, the Beatles instruments and they played you the music and they, they broke down the tracks so that you could have an instrumental of all the tracks.
Speaker B:So you could, could, you know, like play all the separate parts.
Speaker B:What was it called?
Speaker B:Rock.
Speaker A:Oh, Rock.
Speaker A:Rock Band.
Speaker B:Rock Band, of course, yeah.
Speaker B:Because it had all the band instruments and everything.
Speaker B:And I think that there were other versions of Rock Band and they were getting the, the tracks from various artists that they were featuring in it and breaking them down into the sections of the band so that then the people who are starting to do reworks and re edits, we're accessing the stems from that direction and starting to do, you know, like, you know, there's, there's people out there that their whole thing is about finding multi track steps and the late, you know, new ones and they're all over the place.
Speaker B:I mean, there's even people who are finding old tapes now that are going through them and, and digitizing everything and.
Speaker B:And then they become available and you see spates of like you all of a sudden see a certain track and everybody's editing it.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And it's just that it's kind of come in, you know, it's now out there and accessible and there's a whole space of different people wanting to do their versions of it.
Speaker B:So, yeah, you know, by nature, the whole re edits thing is a little bit of wild west.
Speaker B:And I like it for that.
Speaker B:I like the fact that it enables people to personalize what they're doing.
Speaker B:But as I say, you know, sometimes I wish people had kind of.
Speaker B:I mean, what annoys me sometimes isn't, is when it's like, I don't mind a simple edit.
Speaker B:Sometimes that's the best edit, really.
Speaker B:Keep it simple.
Speaker B:All, you know, everything is great about the track, but we need to mix it in, we need to mix it out, keep the rest the way it is.
Speaker B:But a lot of people, sometimes they feel they need to do a few tricks almost to say, look, I'm doing an edit.
Speaker B:I'm doing an edit here.
Speaker B:Whereas, I mean, again, going back to the Beatles, and I've said this before, the kind of single most, you know, important edit in history, in many respects and musically was Strawberry Fields Forever, which were two completely different versions of the track that he'd recorded.
Speaker B:And he, you know, John Lennon, he liked the start of one of them, he liked the rest of the other one.
Speaker B:And so he says to George Martin, you know, George went, well, you know, the pitch might, you know, there might be.
Speaker B:He was like, I know you can fix it.
Speaker B:And he just left him to do it and he did it.
Speaker B:And that version we know of Strawberry Fields, the iconic, you know, song that we all know and love, is two separate recordings.
Speaker B:You know, it's not a single recording.
Speaker B:So the ed.
Speaker B:The edit, some that.
Speaker B:The sim.
Speaker B:That's one edit.
Speaker B:And that one edit is so massively important.
Speaker B:So that.
Speaker B:That means so much more than somebody doing 100 edits.
Speaker B:You know, like sometimes that's way too much.
Speaker B:You've got to keep things to a simplicity and do the right thing for the track that you're trying to play.
Speaker B:Because, I mean, that's my premise in it.
Speaker B:I just want to be able to play certain tracks that are hard to kind of program and mix because of the nature of the way that they Are.
Speaker B:And it's just getting a version that will enable me to.
Speaker B:To do that.
Speaker B:So it's a very direct thing.
Speaker B:You know, it's something I want to play.
Speaker B:That's why I edit tracks.
Speaker B:It's simple as that was.
Speaker A:Without wanting to get into like another massive Beatles conversation.
Speaker A:Don't get me wrong, I'd like to, but wasn't them.
Speaker A:Wasn't the medley initially all separate songs that have been kind of edited together?
Speaker B:The one that came out in the.
Speaker A:One on Abbey Road.
Speaker B:Oh, no, that.
Speaker B:Yeah, that was.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:I was thinking there was actually a Beatles movie medley that was released on a single probably late 70s that was all different.
Speaker B:And obviously there was the stars on 45.
Speaker B:You remember that, the famous star.
Speaker B:But that was originally a bootleg 12 inch in.
Speaker B:In New York.
Speaker B:I think it was Canadian original, originated in Canada.
Speaker B:And it basically medley loads of Beatles records.
Speaker B:And the guy who did the stars on 45 was a guy in, in the Netherlands.
Speaker B:He heard it, got a band or orchestra together and put it all together and sold millions.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker B:So the guy who came up with the original idea and did.
Speaker B:Did the thing in the first place, didn't get anything from it.
Speaker B:So, you know.
Speaker B:So yeah, you know, like the Beatles.
Speaker B:Abbey Road.
Speaker B:Yeah, of course, you know, the editing in, in the, in the Beatles is really important.
Speaker B:You know, it's obviously an aspect of what they were doing in, in various things in their experimentation.
Speaker B:Abbey Road.
Speaker B:Yeah, it was putting all those part tracks in, in certain cases together into a cohesive.
Speaker B:Yeah, brilliant.
Speaker B:You know, so yeah, the edit, the edit is, is a really creative tool, you know, that you can see back from then.
Speaker A:So whilst we're kind of on the subject, and this is the last thing that I, that I really kind of want to get into with you is, you know, we've.
Speaker A:We've talked about your sort of level of knowledge and archiving around the Beatles.
Speaker A:And now I just wanted to talk about the Record Mirror Disco Chart podcast that you and Mike Atkinson are doing.
Speaker A:Can you tell me how that came about?
Speaker B:Yeah, I mean, the podcast, obviously the book, you know, my companies put the book out, right.
Speaker B: James Hamilton's Disco Pages: Speaker B:It was just the main source.
Speaker B:So, you know, wonderful to be able to do that book and get it out.
Speaker B:Mike did such a fantastic job.
Speaker B:And just from that, my.
Speaker B:We did a podcast to help launch the book called who was James Hamilton, where it was just me and Mike talking.
Speaker B:It's.
Speaker B:It's on MixCloud, I think, on my MixCloud, and just talking about James to really kind of lay out for obviously people who had no idea who he was, which was a lot.
Speaker B:A lot of people, probably nearly everyone under 50 and quite a few older, you know, so we did that and it.
Speaker B:It was great.
Speaker B:I mean, he's a natural, you know, and the whole thing, like, really flowed lovely.
Speaker B:And, you know, and.
Speaker B:And so he just came up with the idea and said, how do you fancy doing a podcast series where we take a record, mirror chart, we have a guest, and, you know, we talk about that, we do a rundown of the chart and talk about it.
Speaker B:And I just thought, yeah, that's a really good idea.
Speaker B:You know, Mike kind of handles a lot of the kind of production of it.
Speaker B:You know, I approach the guests and everything, and it's really worked fantastically well.
Speaker B:You know, I've just been so happy with it.
Speaker B:I mean, the level of the guests that we've got, it's obviously important.
Speaker B:You have to have people that are knowledgeable and understand the time that we're talking about.
Speaker B:So we kicked it off with.
Speaker B:With Norman Cook, who.
Speaker B:Who did the introduction to James Hamilton's Disco Page is the book, which is great.
Speaker B:And also what I'm interested in as well is like, we took Norman back to when he was like, 18, you know, we didn't want to hear about, you know, the fact.
Speaker B:Well, you know, it's out of our kind of time scale.
Speaker B:But it wasn't the fat boy slim aspect.
Speaker B:It was this young guy.
Speaker B:He wasn't even Norman Cook then.
Speaker B:He was Quentin, you know, and he.
Speaker B:He.
Speaker B:We met him in Brighton at the time, and that's how my background is with him.
Speaker B:I was on a Hacienda Tour in late 83 and with broken Glass, the Breakdancers, and he invited us back to an after party.
Speaker B:He came the next day to the.
Speaker B:The gig that we were doing, and during the sound check, I showed him the rudiments of cutting and scratching.
Speaker B:Very, very much the rudiment.
Speaker B:I mean, I was no turntableist, but I, I, by this point worked it out and I was able to show him.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And that was interesting because he'd actually seen Grandmaster Flash in concert but didn't know what he was doing because from his vantage point in the crowd, there was no cameras on the decks or anything, so he could just see somebody up there and he couldn't work out what was Going on.
Speaker B:So this enabled him.
Speaker B:It unlocks something.
Speaker B:He went back to Brighton and, you know, he head down and practiced and went through his time with the House Martins.
Speaker B:And then like towards the end of the decade, he's kind of doing dance music and turning up with Beats International, getting to number one with Dubbed Be Good to Me.
Speaker B:And that was like.
Speaker B:At that point, I read something, I was reading.
Speaker B:I was in London, I was going to an EMI meeting.
Speaker B:We had the Rap Assassin signed to EMI at the time.
Speaker B:And I was reading either Enemy or Melody Maker and it was Beats International and I'm Norman Cook, House Martins.
Speaker B:Yeah, you know, and I'm getting an angle on who's this made this record.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And then he says influences and he mentions Grandmaster Flash and he mentions me.
Speaker B:And I was like.
Speaker B:I mean, I hadn't DJ'd at this point for six years or five years or whatever.
Speaker B:And so I was way out the loop.
Speaker B:I was kind of a forgotten man.
Speaker B:And all of a sudden this guy is saying, I'm an influence for some reason.
Speaker B:So it kind of stumped me.
Speaker B:I didn't know who it was.
Speaker B:I was thinking, I don't know anyone from Hall.
Speaker B:And I asked like Kermit from the Rap Assassins.
Speaker B:Later I said this thing and he said, oh yeah, that's Quentin.
Speaker B:And I was like.
Speaker B:He said, the guy from Brighton.
Speaker B:And so that's who it was.
Speaker B:And Norman was Quentin, you know.
Speaker B:And so he ended up doing a couple of remix of the Rap Assassins on the back of that.
Speaker B:And then later down the line, I did a really nice interview with him.
Speaker B:Again, not no questions about Fat Boy Slim.
Speaker B:I mean, it all been asked.
Speaker B:What I wanted to know was his background, his musical influences, where he'd come from.
Speaker B:So probably asked him a lot of questions he'd never been asked before on that level and did that interview.
Speaker B:And so again, later down the line, when.
Speaker B:When the book came up and we think about somebody to do the intro.
Speaker B:Norman was a big James Hamilton fan when I did the Discotheque Archives, my own book, which had like classic DJs, classic venues, records and labels.
Speaker B:And one of the classic DJs I'd done was James Hamilton, who, as, as I say, people wouldn't have known who he was at the time.
Speaker B:And Norman, you know, picked up on that straight away.
Speaker B:And he was saying how big he did.
Speaker B:We did a book talk at.
Speaker B:He's got a place called the Big Beach Cafe in.
Speaker B:In Hove.
Speaker B:And we, he.
Speaker B:We did an interview on outside that.
Speaker B:It was great, you know, and yeah, you know, so he was a big James Hamilton fan, so it kind of figured.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:And so he was sort of the.
Speaker B:It worked with him being the first guest on the podcast series too, and that was great.
Speaker B:And so then we did.
Speaker B:Our second guest was Dave Lee, Joey Negro, or formerly Joey Negro.
Speaker B:Again, brilliant, you know, and again, taking Dave back just a bit before he was a dj, when he was kind of teenage, getting into music, what was his influences?
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And it was brilliant, you know, like such depth out of the.
Speaker B:We did Jeff Young, who, I mean, a forgotten figure in lots of respects.
Speaker B: between: Speaker B:He was the guy before Pete Tong.
Speaker B:Without Jeff Young, you don't have this, you know, the essential selection.
Speaker B:It was, it was Jeff's, you know, pioneering of that kind of time slot that opened it all up and everything that we know since.
Speaker B:But he's kind of been forgotten in many respects.
Speaker B:And yet he was such an important DJ and a brilliant presenter.
Speaker B:And again, you know, having him as a guest and his, his knowledge and depth and it's great, you know, I mean, I have history going back with him to the early 80s when he worked for.
Speaker B:He worked for Phonogram Records.
Speaker B:He was in the club promotions and everything.
Speaker B:I go and go down there.
Speaker B:He brought Cool and the Gang to Legend, my club, you know, and I remember, you know, I got the Buffalo Gals video of him before it was even on the tv.
Speaker B:And I was able to play that in a club in Huddersfield and blow people's minds.
Speaker B:So, you know, this history there on that level.
Speaker B:Morgan Khan was our latest podcast.
Speaker B:And you know, Morgan, you know, what he did in the 80s and the whole street sound and the, the kind of culture that pervaded around that, the hip hop coming into play, his electro series opening that up.
Speaker B:But so much more, you know, the street sounds that he did high energy albums, he did classic stuff, he did house stuff, when, you know, he was right there, a pivotal figure like James Hamilton within the music business that all of a sudden, 20, 30 years on, no one knows him, no one knows who he is, there's books written, no one's written about him.
Speaker B:It doesn't exist.
Speaker B:The fact that he was releasing all these albums that were going into the commercial pop chart because compilations could qualify then, you know, you have electro albums in the pop chart regularly and stuff.
Speaker B:So you're having kids that.
Speaker B:That had had no exposure to the kind of black music culture.
Speaker B:That I was a part of within, you know, like cities like Manchester and London and Leeds, Sheffield, all these were.
Speaker B:There were black communities.
Speaker B:There were these kids that had never met black people in their lives that were now getting seriously into this electro music and what then becomes hip hop.
Speaker B:And so his cultural effects is massive, is seismic.
Speaker B:And yet again, you know, he's not.
Speaker B:He's not somebody that's there in the acknowledged history.
Speaker B:And, and that's such a.
Speaker B:And when you hear him, you know, wow, what stories.
Speaker B:And he's.
Speaker B:He's there, you know, he was there at the birth of hip hop.
Speaker B:I mean, I mean, as we know it in terms of records, we talk about Rapper's Delight and that's the one that ignited the whole thing.
Speaker B:Now he went over to New Jersey where Sugar Hill and Sugar Hill were previously, they were called All Platinum.
Speaker B:And they'd had all sorts.
Speaker B:They'd had shame, Shame, Shame, Shirley and company.
Speaker B:They'd had moments of whatnot.
Speaker B:They'd had Retta, Young, brother to brother, all sorts of artists, you know, like through the 70s, a great, a great label in its own right.
Speaker B:They got to the end of the decade.
Speaker B:In fact, you can see the change over this track called We Got the Funk by Positive Force that was released in America on one of their labels.
Speaker B:Turbo Book came out here on Sugar Hill, right.
Speaker B:And it was Morgan that released that along with Rapids Delight and got a hit out of it here.
Speaker B:Big hit with We Got.
Speaker B:So we know it was the bonus to Rapids Delight.
Speaker B:But basically he went over there and he was young, he was like very brash guy.
Speaker B:He was, you know, really doing great on the club promotion side.
Speaker B:Pie Records, or PRT Precision as they later became, sent him over to.
Speaker B:To meet the Robinson, Sylvia and Joe Robinson.
Speaker B:And while he's there, he's hearing like Rapper's Delight and We got the Funk, you know, and he's going back there and saying, yeah, yeah, we should take this label.
Speaker B:And then they do and they get the.
Speaker B:The UK kind of hit.
Speaker B:It's, you know, becomes a top five hit here.
Speaker B:It's obviously for a period of time, Rappers Delight was regarded as a novelty and rap was regarded as a novelty.
Speaker B:That, yeah, it was seen as a one off.
Speaker B:There was a few more like Curtis Blow did stuff, but it wasn't taken seriously until 82 when Grandmaster Flash, Furious 5, the message that absolutely took it to another stratosphere and this socially conscious, you know, expression, you know, it grew.
Speaker B:It grew from being a party kind of.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:You know, which it was initially so Morgan, you know, is there, I mean, literally right at the beginnings of certain things and.
Speaker B:And that kind of wealth of knowledge, the fact that we don't draw from it, we haven't got the sources properly where people understand, you know, so, yeah, you know, it's always, you know, great, too.
Speaker B:I mean, Morgan's a bit of a divisive character as well, you know, and there's a lot of people who.
Speaker B:And I think this is part of the reason why he became obscured, because when the Street Sounds Empire went belly up in the end, it left a lot of people out of pocket.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:And so there were.
Speaker B:So I think, you know, there was that kind of aspect to it, but I just deal in the history and the facts of these situations.
Speaker B:You can't write people out of history because you feel that they, you know, they didn't do the right thing in a certain situation.
Speaker B:Maybe they didn't, but, you know, you've got to look at the overall picture and say, they did this.
Speaker B:You know, this is.
Speaker B:It wouldn't have happened in the way it did but for their intervention at this point in time.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And he's very much one of those characters.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And I think, as well as the guests, like just all of you on the podcast, it's really interesting hearing the DJ perspective of the time when the songs came out and, like, hearing how James would describe songs as well, and.
Speaker A:And, yeah, things.
Speaker A:It's just.
Speaker A:It's a massive history lesson, not only in terms of the songs, but in terms of, I guess, where DJing was at that point, where labels were, at that point where society was even.
Speaker B:I mean, definitely.
Speaker B:I mean, if.
Speaker B:It's like, if I go back to my discothec archives, but the tagline on that was, you know, to know the future, first, you must know the past.
Speaker B:And, you know, I very much believe that.
Speaker B:That if you have this kind of knowledge on book, because things repeat themselves as well.
Speaker B:If you look at history, there's loads of repetition.
Speaker B:I mean, you look at current affairs now, you know why it's happening, because this happened before.
Speaker B:Things repeat themselves, you know, and it's the same with music and culture and anything, you know, it goes through different kind of periods.
Speaker B:And so if you understand that and see where it's been before, it gives you an indication of where it might be going now.
Speaker B:You know, obviously the environment's completely different.
Speaker B:The way we make music, you know, the way we consume music, all these things are different.
Speaker B:But, you know, this is kind of spirit that underlies, you know, that you see it, you know, and you see the cautionary tales as well.
Speaker B: t's like when we got into the: Speaker B:We had that.
Speaker B:That became the norm, that the pop stars were now being created via TV talent shows.
Speaker B:And we'd had that before, but they hadn't really created a lot of pop stars because the pop stars created themselves.
Speaker B:It came from a different direction.
Speaker B:But if we went a little bit further back before that, we're back in the same place.
Speaker B:You know, there's a guy called Larry Ponds in the early 60s, and he had a stable of male kind of pop artists who.
Speaker B:He gave names like Marty Wilde and Johnny Gentle and, you know, these kind of, you know, Rory Storm, you know, it was all.
Speaker B:They were all named and.
Speaker B:And they were geared towards a young teenage female market.
Speaker B:And you see that later on with Simon Cowell and what happens.
Speaker B:It's the same thing.
Speaker B:It's exactly the same thing.
Speaker B:But they're doing it in different ways at different points in time.
Speaker B:And so, you know, that.
Speaker B:That kind of thing with history, it's always the cycles that are going on all the time, especially in music and culture, you know, that you see these cycles going on all the time.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So I had my mate Hudson down in my office earlier on, and he's listened to the.
Speaker A:The recording of Episode two and the deep dive on the Beatles and stuff.
Speaker A:And we were talking about that and he was kind of saying, you know, with the Beatles, they were almost like the first band in a way, in that they kind of everything was.
Speaker A:They wrote everything and sung and played the instruments and it was all kind of one unit like that.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:I mean, in that respect, although, you know, you go like, Elvis never wrote his tracks.
Speaker B:The guy that did, and he.
Speaker B:I mean, they had a massive respect for him.
Speaker B:And in fact, later, Paul McCartney got his publishing, was Buddy Holly, right?
Speaker B:I mean, Buddy Holly was.
Speaker B:Was like doing his own own.
Speaker B:His own stuff.
Speaker B:And so there was a precedent for that.
Speaker B:But.
Speaker B:But in terms of the uk, what was going on at the time, and the pop acts that were like, as I say, they were coming out of these kind of stables of managers.
Speaker B:And then you had Cliff Richard, who was the kind of British Elvis.
Speaker B:Every country had their own Elvis.
Speaker B:And the.
Speaker B:The group the Shadows, they became a thing in their own right as an instrumental group, and that was the musical climate.
Speaker B:When the Beatles titles came along, it was so for them to draw, as we talked about previously, from, like, Rhythm and Blues and, you know, like to do things like Izzy Brothers Twist and Shouts.
Speaker B:We know that as a.
Speaker B:A kind of Beatles classic.
Speaker B:But that was the Isa Brothers who recorded that.
Speaker B:And they also recorded Shouts, which Lulu covered.
Speaker B:I mean, they're all over the place.
Speaker B:These tracks that were covered by.
Speaker B:I mean.
Speaker B:I mean, I think that one of the famous examples, although it wasn't a black act, it was the Righteous Brothers was.
Speaker B:Cilla Black would often cover the big American hits, like Anyone who Had A Heart, which was a Dion Warwick track, and get the track out over here first and get the hit in England before it was released from the American.
Speaker B:So this is what was happening all the time.
Speaker B:And what was it?
Speaker B:Yeah, you've lost that loving feeling.
Speaker B:Who did the other version?
Speaker B:I can't remember who covered it.
Speaker B:And it was going up the charts and the Righteous Brothers was coming, you know, out, and that was behind it.
Speaker B:So it looked like the other version was going to be the hit.
Speaker B:And Andrew Luke Allman, the manager of the Rolling Stones, took it upon himself to put an advert in the press saying, you got to get this.
Speaker B:This is the version.
Speaker B:It had nothing to do with him.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker B:But he just felt so strongly, obviously, because it is the version, you know, like the Righteous Brothers version.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:So, yeah, you know, this.
Speaker B:This whole thing of British artists taking black music or American music and recording it and getting the hits over.
Speaker B:I mean, it happened with the Stones, you know, it's all over now.
Speaker B:You know, that.
Speaker B:That was the Valentino's Black American band with Bobby Womack, and everybody thought that was a Stones record.
Speaker B:Even now they.
Speaker B:If they heard it.
Speaker B:Oh, that's the Stones.
Speaker B:Jagger and Richard must have wrote that.
Speaker B:They didn't start writing till afterwards.
Speaker B:And what started them writing again, we go back to the Beatles because they kind of.
Speaker B:I think they'd done the first Stone single, I think may have been a cover of a Buddy Holly track.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And then, you know, the Beatles, like, basically, I want to be your man, they knocked it off in front of the Stones.
Speaker B:They kind of.
Speaker B:It was a knockoff track that they did.
Speaker B:And the Stones saw them do that and went, hang on a second.
Speaker B:And, you know, like, they covered that and it.
Speaker B:You know, it wasn't a massive hit, but it.
Speaker B:It gave them the exposure to get to the next level and everything.
Speaker B:So it really helped in the.
Speaker B:And especially the.
Speaker B:The connection with the Beatles as well.
Speaker B:And it was only after that that Lou Goldman kind of basically locked Jagger and Richard away and was like, right, you.
Speaker B:You know, made them right Almost.
Speaker B:And then they got it and they were.
Speaker B:Became their own writers.
Speaker B:So, yeah, the Beatles were inspiring everyone and, you know, everyone in terms of how they were approaching music.
Speaker A:And yeah, you mentioned Cilla Black, like, it's easy to forget because of all the TV work, but she was huge, wasn't she?
Speaker B:Well, she was managed by Brian Epstein, who managed the Beatles, and Epstein loved Syllable.
Speaker B:I mean, she was the cloakroom girl at the Cavern.
Speaker B:Her real name was Priscilla White.
Speaker B:Yeah, that's so.
Speaker B:Stage name was Cilla Black.
Speaker B:Like, so she was the girl who was behind the cloak room at the cabin while the Beatles were playing and everything.
Speaker B:And so he.
Speaker B:Epstein, I think he saw a little bit in a kind of sense of, you know, my fur lady, you know, like that kind of taking somebody, you know, like I'm making them into, you know, she was just a Scouse girl, wasn't she?
Speaker B:And he made her into this glamorous kind of star in Bacharach, wrote a track, you know, for her and stuff like that.
Speaker B:And that was all Epstein's, you know, theatricality, I would imagine.
Speaker B:You know, that's, that's his.
Speaker B:His kind of theatricality that.
Speaker B:That would.
Speaker B:Would make him want to work with someone like Cilla Black in that way.
Speaker A:Incredible.
Speaker A:So just going back to the podcast, all I can say to anyone listening is if you want a real.
Speaker A:If you're enjoying the sort of deep dives that we're getting into here, then if you get the Record Mirror Disco Chart podcast, there's plenty more of this sort of thing going on.
Speaker A:The knowledge in it is phenomenal.
Speaker B:Oh, thanks.
Speaker B:I'm really glad you.
Speaker B:You've enjoyed it because.
Speaker B:Yeah, we're having fun doing it.
Speaker B:It's.
Speaker B:It's really working out.
Speaker B:And as I say, the flows.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:It feels right.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, it's really good, you know.
Speaker B:And it feels balanced.
Speaker B:You know, Mike's brilliant, you know, his kind of whole kind of approach and his passion for everything and, you know, so it's.
Speaker B:It really, you know, it's something that I'm.
Speaker B:I'm really glad we did.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Greg, we've had camera issues, we've had Internet issues, we've had microphone local recordings over multiple sessions.
Speaker A:You've given me so much time and you've been so patient kind of going through the problems and things.
Speaker A:I cannot thank you enough for that.
Speaker A:Is there anything else that would you think we need to cover that we've not mentioned?
Speaker B:I mean, I'm not sure I could say that this year will mark the 50th anniversary of when I started DJing.
Speaker B:So, you know, that becomes a bit of a landmark for me.
Speaker B:Really interesting.
Speaker B:I mean, I kind of worked it out, worked the dates out and everything.
Speaker B:When I did my first mobile disc, I already knew when I did my first club date.
Speaker B:You know, I always date things to that.
Speaker B:The the 6th of December, it was my.
Speaker B:But.
Speaker B:But before that, for a few months I was actually earning a few pennies doing mobile discos and everything.
Speaker B:That's how I sorted out.
Speaker B:And I got the club date by doing a mobile disco in the venue that functions rooms upstairs and downstairs.
Speaker B:They had the kind of club room and the DJ hadn't turned up and I managed to go down.
Speaker B:And that's how I started off when I was 15.
Speaker B:So, yeah, you know, revisiting that in a sense and remembering, you know, like where it all kind of came from.
Speaker B:Which.
Speaker B:Which again ties in with the Record Mirror Disco charts because we just did a really interesting one.
Speaker B:I'll give you a kind of, you know, something that's coming up.
Speaker B:I won't say who the guest is, but I mean, we.
Speaker B:We wanted to cover the first Record Mirror Disco charts, which we did.
Speaker B:It's great.
Speaker B:I'm really glad we did it.
Speaker B:But thought it's a horror of a chart.
Speaker B:There's some off, you know, some stuff in there that you just think what.
Speaker B:Where, you know.
Speaker B:And I mean, you know, slave status quo.
Speaker B:And the one that, you know you cannot be named is even in the.
Speaker B:Yeah, gg if you know him.
Speaker B:So, you know, that shows, like you said before, what the thing with the Record Mirror or the James Hamilton Disco Pages book book.
Speaker B:It just illustrates the course of how disco culture worked in this country.
Speaker B:Not on a.
Speaker B:A specialist level.
Speaker B:There were always clubs that were playing, you know, going back into the early 70s and even in the 60s that were playing imported black American music were going for the latest stuff and everything.
Speaker B:But this was a minority in terms of the great ocean of clubs that were out there.
Speaker B:And this is what James tapped into.
Speaker B:So when the.
Speaker B:The charts began that he did, a lot of the DJs that were submitting them came from what were called DJ associations.
Speaker B:And they were mainly mobile DJ associations where you get discounts on certain things that, you know.
Speaker B:So they'd have their own kind of newsletter and magazine.
Speaker B:And so it was these kind of DJs now, you know, a lot, a lot.
Speaker B:Most DJs didn't bother with disco associations, you know, and certainly people who were playing black music or whatever.
Speaker B:So the initial charts, you can See the pop aspect.
Speaker B:And it's very honest, you know, it's very honest because it says if you walked into, you know, most cities in the country, he walked into a club around this time, you'd likely to be hearing, if you stuck around long enough, you know, things like, you know, that are in this.
Speaker B:So, you know, that changed over time because what James was aware of, because of his previous history was a rhythm and blues DJ going back to the early 60s.
Speaker B:He worked in the scene, which was the famous Mod Club club until its closure in the mid-60s.
Speaker B:And so he had that background and so he always had that connection with specialist black music and the specialist black scene.
Speaker B:Although by the, when he started the Record Mirror columns, he wasn't, he was a bit disconnected.
Speaker B:He was doing mobile discos himself, but he was doing like grand balls, you know, he was moving in the upper classes.
Speaker B:He was their DJ of choice.
Speaker B:That's how he made his bread and butter.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:But he very much brought in as well as he could the, the jazz funk scene as it was evolving.
Speaker B:And so by the end of the 80s, you can see the whole music, sorry, the end of the 70s, you can just see the whole music climate changing.
Speaker B:Whereas like people who might have been playing in their club, you know, five years ago, like the poppets in the charts, were now, you know, starting to play a few really tasty jazz funk tunes amongst the stuff.
Speaker B:And you know, you can watch that evolution.
Speaker B:In fact, in the end they, they separated the dance chart and the pot based what they were.
Speaker B:I mean, that's another thing, and I haven't even mentioned this in any of the podcasts yet, but there was a term back then that described these DJs and often in print from James, he did even little features as a heading and it was Wally DJs.
Speaker B:So Wally, a Wally DJ.
Speaker B:And sometimes, you know, he, he said that, you know, he wasn't always kind of putting them down, it's just that they were.
Speaker B:And that was his descriptive term for them.
Speaker B:But what a wally DJ was was somebody on a Saturday went to the record shop, looked at the top 40 or 30, maybe they even did.
Speaker B:You know, they did that on Top of the Pops, they watched what was on in the chart, they went in and they bought the, the new entries or whatever and that's what they played.
Speaker B:They played what was in the charts or what had been in the charts and that was what you were going to get from them.
Speaker B:And so that was his description.
Speaker B:They, they and, and, and they were like in the End he realized that all that they were doing by the, the, the charts that they were sending in was basically, it was behind the pop charts because they weren't interested in new music.
Speaker B:They were interested in popular music, something that was already popular.
Speaker B:So they were almost staggering the charts because they, they were playing stuff like after the event, you know, it had already been in the charts and they were still submitting it in their kind of dance chart.
Speaker B:So we separated it off, had a separate pop bass chart for a while and then just drop that all together.
Speaker B:It was, you know, because as like he said, you may as well look at the normal charts.
Speaker B:Yeah, you know, let's look at, you know, what the pop DJs are playing.
Speaker B:And so, yeah, that was the Wally DJs for you then.
Speaker A:Amazing.
Speaker A:So given that you've got 50 years in and out the game, have you got one key piece of advice for DJs that would be sort of as relevant back then as it is now?
Speaker B:Well, yeah, I think, you know, the thing that's always constant is, you know, like the technology changes the, you know.
Speaker B:Now back then we played off like garage turntables.
Speaker B:They were belt driven.
Speaker B:They weren't, you know, something to be mixed with.
Speaker B:We had a microphone and we introduced them back announced records.
Speaker B:So now, you know, you've got any amount of technology that you can bring to bear.
Speaker B:So massive changes there.
Speaker B:But the thing is always the same.
Speaker B:It's this reciprocal action between you and what music you're bringing to bear and the audience that you're working with.
Speaker B:And I always say reciprocal because, you know, you've got to work with an audience.
Speaker B:You're nothing without the audience.
Speaker B:But, but I think one of the things that happened like post Rave, that I started to hear people saying DJs, saying I re.
Speaker B:I mean, it was when they started talking about sets.
Speaker B:Sets was never a term that we use.
Speaker B:Back in the day, a set was something abandoned and they wrote it down on a piece of paper so that their set list.
Speaker B:So now they would talk, these DJs in kind of early, early 90s, it'd be.
Speaker B:Were talking about sets.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And I was now realizing what they were telling me was that throughout the week they were practicing what they were going to play at the weekend.
Speaker B:So they were locking in the mixes, right?
Speaker B:And what they were going to do is recreate that at the weekend.
Speaker B:Which kind of blew me away a little bit because for me the live thing is different.
Speaker B:You know, that was almost like doing a studio thing, getting, getting a mix together and Then, all right, I get it.
Speaker B:The, the, you know, but to me, there was no room for spontaneity within that, no room for going off, no room if the audience on to, to move in a different direction.
Speaker B:You were locked into something.
Speaker B:And so I hear people say, and I hear some DJs sometimes saying, you know, the audience was, they didn't have a clue.
Speaker B:They were just a waste of time.
Speaker B:You know, they just, and I'm like, yeah, you know, you can't say that about the audience because the audience or what they are, they might not get exposure to the type of music that, you know, you want to play to them.
Speaker B:The person who, the problem is here is the promoter.
Speaker B:They shouldn't have put you as a dj.
Speaker B:And with that audience, it didn't work, obviously, but you weren't in a position that you could see that audience and be able to say, look, look, it's not going to work out the way that I hoped it was here.
Speaker B:But am I going to connect with them and are we going to have a good night or is it just going to be, you know, a non event, you know, and, and so I think that you've always got to be adaptable in your circumstance.
Speaker B:You can't lock yourself in.
Speaker B:You know, I think that takes it too far when you, you, you know, you know exactly what you're going to play.
Speaker B:And also you might be going into a, a city or a town where you've never been before and you're going in knowing exactly what you're going to play.
Speaker B:You know, it might not work.
Speaker B:You've got to somehow work this out, you know, for yourself.
Speaker B:As I say, a promoter can put you in the wrong place.
Speaker B:We shouldn't blame the audience because, you know, it is all about exposure.
Speaker B:And I mean, it's like I see places now that were once hotbeds of music.
Speaker B:They were great.
Speaker B:There was these underground scenes there, you know, and there's nothing there now.
Speaker B:There's, there's no scene on or, you know, there's a detachments with the youth from, from, from the culture, you know, like.
Speaker B:And so that, that's, that's it, you know, it's the, it's difficult enough as it is because of the climate that we're in with clubs closing down.
Speaker B:And it is a big difference now.
Speaker B:And I don't know if we can ever, we.
Speaker B:You can never get it back.
Speaker B:You can never go back to stuff.
Speaker B:But I don't know if, you know, how, what it'll take to recapture the spirit of what We've seen happen in the past.
Speaker B:You know, it was, you know, when you look at scenes like rave and punk and hip hop spirit people.
Speaker B:People have become, you know, so engaged with it and everything that it's just part of.
Speaker B:And I don't know if we have that so much now.
Speaker B:I think we might have lost it to a degree.
Speaker B:And I don't know how we come back to it.
Speaker B:Although at the same time as that, I do believe we'll come back to something brilliant.
Speaker B:You know, I think every generation has its own culture and will reinvent sometimes things stagnate for a while.
Speaker B:It.
Speaker B:It's again like going through history, you know, like there's different periods of time where at some points that we're really at a creative level, then we kind of peak with it.
Speaker B:And then it goes through a period where, yeah, people are still doing stuff, but haven't we heard it before?
Speaker B:Doesn't it sound familiar?
Speaker B:Doesn't it sound like someone else?
Speaker B:You know, you have that kind of period and then eventually something comes along.
Speaker B:Just like when we go back, you know, like to the early 60s, something comes along like the Beatles and tears it all up, or something comes along like sergeant Peppers and tears it all up, or Dark side of the Moon, you know, or, or, you know, going back Ray Charles and what I say, you know, and these moments ignite and inspire.
Speaker B:And I suppose that's what we're kind of waiting for.
Speaker B:It's also that the media is so fragmented now.
Speaker B:So again, if we go back to the 60s, and if you were wanted to hear the Beatles apart from on a record, on the radio, you had one chance a week.
Speaker B:The BBC did a light entertainment program.
Speaker B:This is like before Radio 1 came along in 67.
Speaker B:So once a week you could hear pop music on, on, on.
Speaker B:On BBC Radio.
Speaker B:Once a week you had Ready, Steady Go, which was a great program.
Speaker B:So everyone's tuned into that.
Speaker B:Once a week you have Top of the Pops.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:So you have, you know, you have a few music magazines, you know, you don't even have radio one till 67.
Speaker B:You have the pirate stations.
Speaker B:If you can kind of tune in, you can get.
Speaker B:And they're playing really good music and really interesting black music and what will become kind of rock music and stuff.
Speaker B:So that's where it was.
Speaker B:But what that did and the.
Speaker B:The big positive is that if you appeared on Ready, Steady Go, the eyes of the nation were on you.
Speaker B:If you went on Top of the Pops, you were gonna, you know, make a lot of money just for that one appearance because loads of kids the next day would be going out and buying your record.
Speaker B:And now we don't have those centralized bases.
Speaker B:They're all disseminated.
Speaker B:You know, they're all kind of scattered.
Speaker B:And so it's very difficult to create a coherent scene because, you know, everything's all over the place.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:But it will eventually find its way, as these things do.
Speaker A:Amazing.
Speaker A:Right, Greg, I'll let you get off and live your life.
Speaker A:Thanks ever so much for all your time.
Speaker A:It's been fantastic, awesome.
Speaker A:All the best.
